[mythtv-users] "Cell Microprocessor Simultaneously Decoding 48 MPEG-2 Streams"

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon May 2 22:48:59 UTC 2005


David Wood wrote:

> Please correct me if I have this wrong: the changes in cell are more 
> than just skin deep - more, even, than just adding multiple functional 
> units and interconnects. I think it's appropriate to say that cell 
> represents a kind of philosophical shift.

Exactly!

> There are some readable background papers out now, for instance:
>
> http://www.blachford.info/computer/Cells/Cell0.html

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2379

and

http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-1.ars
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/cell-2.ars

>
> As an example, the cell approach to caching is radically different.

And so much more.  They basically threw out all of the conventional 
wisdom about creating processors and started from a clean slate.  When 
confronted with dogma (i.e. all modern CPU's must support "out-of-order" 
instruction processing), they asked why--and in many cases did the exact 
opposite (all 9 cores support only in-order execution).  Their sole 
purpose was to create a processor that is ideally suited to highly 
parallel computing tasks (i.e. graphics processing, physics 
processing--the two key components of gaming--etc.) and cheap to produce.

Mike


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